Software Selection Navigator

The "secret sauce" behind Wayferry's software selection success

Selecting software that best supports your business strategy is a crucial part of a major software purchase like ERP.

A core part of Wayferry’s “secret sauce” is our Software Selection Navigator, a proprietary application we developed to measure how well software products meet your specific business needs. The screenshots below highlight how the Navigator helps you identify best fit software.

Software gap analysis heatmap

After vendors have responded to the RFP, the gap analysis heatmap measures how well those potential software products meet the requirements.

Using the heatmap you can compare several potential software products against each other at once. You can also drill down to any level of detail and compare the products at that level of detail.

Software gap analysis summary

Used to track the overall progress of rating products against the requirements. Also shows the top level fit scores for each product.

We also use this report to verify the scope of your project to ensure the desired functionality can be satisfied by software products on the market.

Software requirement weighting

We capture who wants a requirement, why they want it and how important it is to them. This information is used in the selection and later in the implementation.

Requirement gathering and weighting are usually about half the work in a software selection project. Our project management tracks the progress weighting requirements on an evaluation. Once all requirements have been weighted invitations to participate in the RFP can be sent to system integrators and software publishers.

Software requirement library

Wayferry has built an impressive library of software requirements. Every software selection project we undertake adds to and improves on this library.

Unlike the endless flat lists of requirements that are usually used, Wayferry’s library is organized in a hierarchical tree structure where requirements contain children and grand children etc. as deep as is necessary. In the screenshot on the right the yellow highlighted requirements go 4 levels deep. This hierarchical approach provides many benefits, e.g.:

Drill down: When it comes to requirements, “the devil is in the details” You can drill down into the details as deep as is necessary.

Reduces work: If a higher level requirement is weighted as “No interest”, all descendants of that requirement are automatically removed from the evaluation.

Software requirement details

Most requirement specifications are lists in a spreadsheet. Some add descriptions to the requirements. Wayferry requirements go much further by including:

Examples of where the requirement is used.

Common reasons for the requirement. (You can add client specific reasons as well.)

This detail minimizes the ambiguous requirements problem which, in a worst case scenario, ends up with you and the vendor in court.

Next steps

If your software purchase is business critical and you appreciate the rigor the Software Selection Navigator can bring to the selection process, click the [Contact Wayferry] button below. We can explore helping you make this software purchase an outstanding success for both your organization, and also for you personally.

Note

The Software Selection Navigator is a complete redesign of the original Wayferry app, and is built using a low-code development tool. The changes we wanted to make were so big that everything was re-written from scratch, and none of the original code has been reused.